Intel Skulltrail

An enthusiastic gaming platform, Intel’s Skulltrail was released on February 19, 2008. It is based on the company’s 5400 “Seaburg” workstation chipset with the primary differentiator between Skulltrail and Intel’s current and past enthusiast chipsets being a dual CPU socket design that allows two processors to operate on the same motherboard. This enables Skulltrail to operate eight processing cores on one system. The platform supports two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors which operate at 3.2 GHz.

Skulltrail is one of the first platforms to support SLI on chipsets and achieves this by including two NVIDIA nForce 100 PCIe 1.1 switch (two x16 to one x16) chips. The implementation of SLI supports Quad SLI technology is achieved through the use of two dual-GPU graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2, giving a total of four graphics processors. Owners of Skulltrail systems can also make use of up to four ATI graphics cards using ATI CrossFireX technology, which made SkullTrail the only platform (other than Intel X58 and P55 Chipset) to support both SLI and CrossFire with public drivers at the time of release. Skulltrail was demonstrated by Intel at the Fall 2007 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, USA, and at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Skulltrail has a front side bus rate of 400 MHz (1600 MHz QDR) and was demonstrated with two 45 nanometer High-K processors running at 3.2 GHz. A 4.0 GHz phase cooled Skulltrail system was demonstrated during the IDF. Then on October 22nd, 2007, the two processors were demonstrated running at 4.4 GHz with water cooling. They were demonstrated again on October 31, 2007, this time running at 5.0 GHz, with phase change cooling. On April 18, 2008 Tom’s Hardware, reporting from an Overclocking Enthusiast site, reported that an overclocked speed of 6.006 GHz was achieved on an 8-core Skulltrail setup.